Cinnamon buns

Now that we are away from sunny and hot Fuerteventura, where I wanted to keep all the cooking to the minimum, it's time to start baking again.

Cinnamon buns are on sale here in all forms and shapes — starting from packages of ready-made ones that apparently will keep "fresh" for years (just how do they do that?), through freshly baked and "just stick in the oven" frozen ones, and to the ones that you need to assemble yourself from chilled dough.

But of course it is more interesting to make things from scratch.

Apparently truly Finnish version of those, although very similar in ingredients, is supposed to have a shape of "slapped ears", where you cut the roll of dough diagonally, alternating right and left angle of the cut, but I decided to go with straight cuts and spiral shape.

Here you can see how much butter, sugar and cinnamon filling is used. An awful lot, if you excuse a professional term.

I followed this recipe, with one important omission — I didn't use the cardamom (gasp, shock, horror). I know it is an essential ingredient, but the first time I did add it and our kids didn't like it, so... On the other hand, now, with the winter approaching, their firm preference is for anything with chocolate, so they might be leaving all of the buns for us, in which case I can start adding cardamom again. 

Copy of the recipe, so you don´t have to go to and fro, with slight modifications:

Ingidients:

Dough
  25 g of fresh yeast
  85 g of butter, unsalted
  250 ml of milk
  50 ml of sugar
  Pinch of salt
  700 ml  of flour
  1 egg for glazing

Filling 

  85 g butter, unsalted
  125 ml sugar
  1 Teaspoon cinnamon

Plus

  1 egg for glazing

Process

Melt the butter and add the milk in a saucepan until lukewarm, break in the yeast, dissolve, add the rest of dough ingredients and knead until smooth. Leave to raise for 30 mins. Mix the filling meanwhile.

Knead a bit more and then roll the dough out in a rectangle. I find it easied to roll it quite thick and in a long rectangle. Spread the filling. Roll into a tube on the short side. For the easiness of cutting, I suggest you stretch/rol the tube till you can see that you can easily cut it in 12 to 16 buns. The filling is slippery, so it is easier to cut into squarish cylinders and then slap them down to disks.

Place to buns on a parchment´lined baking sheet and leave to rise for another 30 minutes.

Start the oven to 225°C. You know your oven best, so time it accordingly. 

Glase with egg, sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 10 mins.

That´s it!

I guess I should watch my weight carefully in the nearest few months. Freshly baked things are so difficult to resist.

Next — wheat and rye bread. Stay tuned :)

Baked stuff pics on Shutterstock

Peacock baktus

I had this yarn sitting in my basket for so long, I can't even recall what sort of mix it was. The only thing I am sure about is that it is a silk mix, bit that as far as it goes. I tried searching, but can't find anything that rings a bell.

And Kirill managed to find it! It's "sea silk" by Hand Maiden Fine Yarns, 70% Silk, 30% Seacell 400 m, 100 g.

Anyway. It's a thin soft shiny yarn, warm to touch, dyed in a shortish sections of raspberry, purple, green and blue, so it's quite a large spread of colors. Overall effect it's more or less dark blue. From the website it looks like that particular set of colors is not done any more.

I tried different types of stitches, but in the end went for simplest all-knit — more complicated stitches didn't go well with the yarn.

As a nice little bonus, and unexpectedly for me, the short sections did form two "pools". They formed in two places where the width of the scarf is about fifteen cm, and disappeared naturally as the baktus triangle widened/narrowed.

I should probably stop knitting scarfs now :)

Knitting pics on Shutterstock

Embroidery cover-ups

I don't know about you guys but I love charity shops. Charity shops is one of the things that I am missing badly on Fuertevetura, so during this year's holidays in the UK I kept buying and buying stuff in the charity shops. Fortunately, by now I learned stopping myself from buying something that I definitely not going to use — woollies. I concentrated on summery things, with one exception — this jeans jacket, which hopefully will be useful when Canarian winter strikes with its usual fierceness.

Now to "what I've done" bit. Charity shop things often have small defects on them, which I guess are reasons why the previous owners part with their much-loved stuff in the first place. This jacket was no exception — although in good condition, it had a small hole on the back of the right sleeve. And that was a good reason to exercise my (not-that-extensive) embroidery skills.

Of embroidery I know very little, practically nothing, and do even less. But one thing that I do I learned a while ago — creative darning using the chain stitch. It's an extremely useful stitch, as it is very flexible and once you've decided what figure are doing, you just sort of fumble you way along, correcting and adjusting as needed. I did my first cover-up years ago embroidering a little lizard on my best, but by-then-old, sweater. People who know me and Kirill personally might now go "ah-ha!" finally discovering the explanation for sudden appearance of color matching animals, flowers and other patterns on our garments.

This little tribal sun is not the best thing I did, but it'll do and this jacket will hopefully serve another few years.

Other crafty pics on Shutterstock

a feat of extreme slouchiness

I've made this top almost three years ago, buying the "organic" cotton and a set of bamboo needles  in a Danish supermarket. The holidays were lazy, as summer holidays should be; and I bought the knitting articles for the want of something to do with my hands while enjoying the emptiness of the head to the full.

Somehow I never got to wear it before now. Now I do though.

It's an extremely simple thing, just a strip of Shaker ribbing (at least, I think that's what it is called), sewn into a tube, with a trim extended into straps. The organic cotton proved to be an extremely soft, with no twist to it; it doesn't hold shape at all, but stretches very well in the ribbing. The funny little tie belt for the trousers is made of the same material.

The reason why I am standing on one leg most of the time is that we had an extremely hot few days; and the sunroof tiles felt rather like hotplate.

Knitting pics on Shutterstock

Onion skin eggs

A little while ago I saw an instruction on how to make decorated eggs using flat object (leaves, flowers) as a paint mask and a pair of thin old tights to hold the mask in place. The dye that was used made me feel really nostalgic — it was skins of brown onions, one of the two dyes my granny used to color the chicken eggs for Easter. Second one, quite surprisingly, was solution of brilliant green, an antiseptic that gave bright emerald color and made the eggs look inedible.

So I started to accumulate onion skins. However, when the time came to dyeing I discovered that there is not a pair of tights anywhere (well, it is Fuerteventura). So I improvised with simple masks made of whatever passes for wax in the candles these days. The actual dyeing is really simple — just boil your eggs together with the onion skins (don't try to blow out the content of the egg first — empty eggshells refuse to sink into water)

Now looking at it, I shouldn't have bothered, the color is beautiful in itself, without additional patterns, plus the waxy substance dissolved once the water started to boil, giving access for the dye to the eggshell and partially destroying the pattern. Still, here they are

More photos of eggs on Shutterstock

Dulce de leche

Fresh milk is delivered into local supermarkets once a week, and is good for approximately a week also. They tend to keep the previous lot on the shelves up till the "best before" date. Given that, we occasionally end up with some milk that is about to expire and I urgently need to find something to do with it. Last week we ended up with two 1-liter cartons of milk and no immediate use for it, so I decided to make something kind of new for me — Dulce de leche.

It was only new "kind of", because in my childhood a similar product "варёная сгущёнка", cooked condensed milk, was a firm favourite with pretty much everybody I knew. Dulce de Leche is made from scratch with whole milk and sugar, so you end up with similar-tasting product.

I used this recipe, which was the first hit with google. It worked well, but I must note that our ideas of "simmering" are probably different somewhat. Even after three hours the liquid was not yet reduced to one fourth of the original volume, while starting to turn alarmingly dark, lot darker than in all the pictures I saw. So I decided to stop cooking, and it was probably the right moment.

I was somewhat concerned that it will start burning and I will have to stand by the cooker for all three hours stirring non-stop, but it didn't show any inclinations to do so. Neither it tried to escape form the pan, something that boiling milk tend to do. It just bubbled merrily away, and I stirred it occasionally.

What I ended up with is darker and slightly more transparent than "сгущёнка" from my childhood. Taste is nearly the same.

It probably is not meant to be used just like that, but a bit of dulce de leche on a piece of dry biscuit tastes good. The recipe says that it can stand for a month in the fridge. I don't think it will last that long.

More photos of sweet food on Shutterstock

anti-calima baktus scarf

We had a small sandstorm a few weeks back, possibly calima, possibly something more local. Timur requested a scarf in his school colors to keep it over his mouth and nose if it was ever to occur again. I made it for him very quickly, and today he worn it again — more for coldish strong wind than for sand.

I couldn't find the origins of a "baktus" scarf, but that seems to be the right spelling at least. If you never seen them before — they are very long narrow triangles, very easy to tie. This is a very basic model, all-knit keeping to shape.

Knitting pics on Shutterstock